How it works

Beat 73 is a deterministic basketball roster game. It uses historical season statistics to create a challenging draft, then runs an entertainment simulation. It is not a forecast, scouting product, or betting tool.

The draft

Every seed selects five team-seasons from a curated 40-team pool covering 1990-91 through 2024-25. You sign exactly one player from each draw and fill PG, SG, SF, PF, and C. Player prices plus paid re-spins cannot exceed the $100M cap.

Player model

The current model combines box-score Game Score, true shooting, turnovers, BPM, defensive BPM, minutes, games played, and a small team-record adjustment. The displayed rating is a compact game value, not an attempt to settle cross-era player rankings.

Prices

Prices are synthetic. A convex curve makes elite seasons disproportionately expensive, creating tradeoffs between stars and lineup balance. They are labeled as game prices and do not represent historical salaries or contracts.

The season

Lineup strength combines all five player ratings with small adjustments for shooting efficiency, playmaking, defense, availability, and complete positional coverage. The simulator creates the same 82-opponent schedule for every player using that seed, adds home-court context and game-level variance, and produces a reproducible record.

The 73-9 benchmark

A run beats the benchmark at 74 wins. The separate Warriors matchup percentage compares lineup strength with a fixed model-v1 profile of the 2015-16 Golden State team. It is a game mechanic, not a claim about an actual hypothetical game.

Best legal five

After the season, an exhaustive optimizer checks legal lineups from the same five final team draws. It uses the player budget left after your re-spins, requires all five positions, allows one player per draw, and never repeats a player.

Data and independence

The launch dataset is derived from the publisher-declared CC0 “NBA Stats (1947-present)” dataset by Sumitro Datta on Kaggle. Beat 73 is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NBA, its teams, or players. Production team badges are original text treatments; official logos and player photos are not used.